Final Grad School Update

So I made my decision regarding grad school a few weeks ago, and in the rush that is the end of my undergraduate career at McGill, I completely forgot to update you all (well, the few of you who actually read my blog) as to what that decision was.

I've decided accept the offer of admission to the Anthropology PhD program at the University of Michigan. Done and done. I guess that means I'll have to move myself to Ann Arbor this summer.

The posting frequency will increase again in May as by then I'll have written my last exams and finished my thesis. Accordingly, the next Archaeodigms post will be up in early May. Also, Megalith just had a gig and has another two coming up in the next few weeks, if any of our material gets youtubed I'll be sure to post it here.

The next post will have some sort of substance, I promise. Until next time.

Megalith Videos (Part 2 - Sabbath Time)

Ok so here are the next two Megalith Videos from our show on March 7th, and yes, they are both Black Sabbath Covers. The first one is Paranoid, a last minute addition to the set, but definitely a good decision. Most of the band was sick and you can hear the 'rasp' of the cold in our keyboardist's voice as she's singing this one, which actually makes the song sound great! The second video is Warpigs, which was what you could call our 'opus' last year (meaning it was the only song the entire band could play up until about a week before our first show!). As you can see, I think we've got Warpigs in the bag. At the beginning of the video you hear a lot of screeching feedback, which was caused by the misbehaving amp of one of our musical guests for the evening, who was playing the electric saw! yes you've read me right, the electric saw, and no this is not a band saw or table saw or anything of the power tool variety, it's your standard hand held wood saw, with a pick up duct taped to one end to amplify it (ie. AWESOME.), and played with a bow (a la cello..sort of). I think the feed back at the beginning of the song is actually quite cool and suits the feel of Warpigs in general. Anyway, enough talk, enjoy the videos, the next Archaeodigms post (Part 2: Culture History) should be up in the first half of the coming week, and stay tuned for more Megalith videos, it was a good show!





One more thing, use good speakers or headphones for the best sound quality, twas a hand held video camera after all!

Megalith Videos (Part 1)

The first two videos from our show last Saturday (March 7th, 2009, at the McGill Anthrograd Conference) are up so as I promised, here they are! The first video is us covering Whipping Post by the Allman Brothers, and the second video is us doing an acoustic cover of Simple Man by Lynyrd Skynyrd. I'll post more Megalith videos when they are ready.





Also, the sound quality isn't the greatest, though it is MUCH better than the videos we had last year, so if your going to watch the videos use some good speakers or some headphones for the best sound!

Archaeodigms Part 1: Reiterating the Point

This past weekend (March 6th and 7th, 2009) was the first (and hopefully annual) McGill Anthrograd conference. At this conference many Graduate, PhD, and even some Undergrad students presented papers on their research in several sessions, which were chaired by McGill University Anthropology Faculty members. Overall I think the conference went extremely well, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I commend the Graduate students who put so much work into organizing it. Now before I get into what the conference got me thinking about and where I'm going with this whole 'Archaeodigms' thing, I want to also tell you that the McGill Archaeology lab band - Megalith - in which I play the bass (plus some vocals and guitar on select songs), played their second ever show to close the conference. We got the whole show on a video camera and will be posting a few of the songs on youtube, so when they are ready I will definitely post them here.

Ok, so back to the conference. One theme I noticed was a general disconnect between Anthropologists and Archaeologists. I don't want to get too much into this but I just want to say that this is kind of problematic. Archaeology is considered to be a branch of Anthropology here in North America, but too often us Archaeologists seem to to get relegated to a 'little naive brother' status within North American Anthropology on the whole, and our work seems to get generally ignored by most Anthropologists. Ok, sure, maybe they don't find it interesting, but it's our approach that they should be taking into account, such as something as simple as time depth, which I find is sometimes lacking in Anthropological studies, and can add whole new perspectives. To be a little bit 'Hodder-ish', and also a little over-simplistic, I feel like the relationship between Anthropology and Archaeology should be this:

Anthropology <----> Archaeology

instead of what it seems to be currently:

Anthropology ------> Archaeology

Anyway, let me know what you think of this, I'm not sure how clear I've made it, but maybe that's because it's still kind of fuzzy in my head.

Now this got me thinking about theory in general, and particularly where we stand theoretically as Archaeologists today. Does the one-way relationship between Anthropology and Archaeology exist because we are not theoretically sound enough yet to truly contribute and are still actually the little brother? Are we still playing 'theoretical catch-up'? Have we truly reached a theoretical middle ground between processualism and post-processualism? or are we still in a polemic debate between the two? To paraphrase one of my Professors here at McGill, maybe this theoretical diversity is what we need, because that way our odds of actually being right may be higher, but the answers to these questions are not clear to me yet. I want to try and hopefully answer some of these questions (clearly with your help) in something I'm going to call the 'Archaeodigms' series. This has also been inspired by my reading the Golden Marshalltown article by Flannery a little while ago and the fact that I'm taking a course entitled "The History of Archaeological Thought" right now, which is awesome by the way. We've gotten to post-processualism and I'm asking myself "Has there been a Marshalltown-esque article discussing the pitfalls and/or discontent with post-processualism by an actual post-processualist?"...maybe we will find out.

So hopefully through this five part series we will try to find out what constitutes a theoretical middle ground (and, feel free to challenge me, but I feel that a middle ground is the best place to be), and if this middle-ground is being applied today. In each part of this series I want to discuss the pros and cons of the three major theoretical and methodological paradigms in Archaeology (Culture History, Processualism, and Post-processualism). I also want your contribution to these pros/cons lists, so please comment after the posts! I hope that this way we can try to integrate the positives of all the paradigms and see what we get, and see if recent work has gotten to our formulated middle-ground theory, which will be what the fifth and final post will hopefully do!

Now I don't want this just to be me going through what I think of the paradigms, I want your contributions too, so I will reiterate what I said in the previous paragraph, post your comments/questions/problems/contributions after each post of the series! I want it to be almost like a forum for Archaeological theory....well that's the idea anyway.

I guess that's all for for now, stay tuned for 'Archaeodigms Part 2: Culture History' as well as Megalith videos!

References in this Post:

Ian Hodder. 1991 (1986). Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology 2nd Ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. (Ch 1, pp.1-18).

Kent V. Flannery. 1982. The Golden Marshalltown: A Parable for the Archeology of the 1980s. American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 84, No. 2, pp. 265-278.